When civilized people dance they reconnect with their old animal nature. It reminds them that they aren’t mechanical chess pieces or rooted trees, but free-flowing meat waves of possibility.
Whether you need the solace of normality more than you need your unique power is a personal matter, which only you may decide. But Sissy, don’t let people such as Julian Gitche influence your decision. Julian needs your thumbs, huge and murmuring like the mouths of unexplored rivers – just the way nature made them – even if he isn’t wise enough to understand that he needs them.
IT WAS AUTUMN, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive.
A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.
Turn a mountain upside down, you have a woman. Turn a woman upside down, you have a valley. Turn a valley upside down, you get folk music.
Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable.
The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.
Outside, the rains had come, the rains that like a blizzard of guppies would pelt the creaky old house until spring. There is no weeping that can compete with the northwest rains.
There was a purity about him, a blaze in his eyes, that bordered on the charismatic. I also had the sense that hanging out with him would be dangerous: not because he might prove mean, violent, dishonest, or crazier than anybody else I knew, but because he seemed both completely uncompromised and completely uncompromising. As Henry Miller said of Rimbaud, he was “like a man who discovered electricity but knew absolutely nothing about insulation.
Death is not a resident of the house. ‘Death’ is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called ‘living,’ fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them.
You know that I’ve always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It’s the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature’s experiments, and if they aren’t too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters – or mice.
To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.
Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello.
Kudra had awakened him from a long sleep. No, that was false, he hadn’t been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth.
It is dullness and not evil that begets totalitarianism.
He said, ‘The perfect taco.’ That’s it, those were his last words. He sighed, ‘Ahhh,’ and said, ‘The perfect taco.
In Bokonon, it is written that “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
Plants and animals are even more comfortable with death. It is the natural end. But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.
The moon can’t help it. It’s only a fat dumb object, the pumpkin of the sky. The moon’s a mess, to tell the truth. A burnt-out cinder the color of dishwater; a stale gray cookie covered with scars. Every loose rock in our solar system has taken a punch at it. It’s been scorched, golf-clubbed, and inflicted with boils. If lovers have chosen this brutalized derelict, this tortured dustball, this pitted and pimpled parcel of wasteland as the repository of their dreams, the moon can’t help it.
Once, Princess Leigh-Cheri used a papal candlestick for the purpose of self-gratification. She had hoped that at the appropriate moment she might be visited by either the Lamb or the Beast, be, as usual, only Ralph Nader attended her.